His Alter Ego Is Really the Star

The bass player is absent, tending to his sick mom. The keyboard player is not only fairly new to the band, but he’ll have to handle the bass parts with his left hand while doing his own with his right.

Still, Ron Fountenberry, the boss of this operation, seems calm as he sits at a table in the bar of the Troubadour just a couple of hours before show time at the West Hollywood club.

Perhaps he’s at ease under the stress because it won’t be Ron Fountenberry on stage this night. No, it’ll be the Incredible Moses Leroy who sings the charming love song “Fuzzy” in front of film clips from slasher movies, and who mimes to a recording of an old ditty instructing kids to cover their mouths when they sneeze.

The Incredible Moses Leroy is the nom de pop Fountenberry appropriated (it’s from an admired great-grandfather who had been a civil rights activist) as a way to cope with the mind-bend he’s experienced in becoming a public figure. The “incredible,” he says, adds a cartoonish, winking unreality.

“When I hear myself on the radio or see my picture, it’s like seeing someone else,” says the mild-mannered Fountenberry, 28. “There’s a sense of elation and then a sense of feeling weird and ‘Wow, that’s me?’ There’s definitely a separation thing happening. I see at shows people put up posters and I don’t look at it as me. I have to put a wall up there, otherwise I get insanely shy, or else too caught up in myself, which I don’t want to do.”

Having an alter ego, he says, has helped him open up as a performer.

“I’m myself when I’m performing, but a different side,” he says. “I can’t get up there and be normal. I’m a pretty quiet person. I can’t get up and be that way in front of all those people. The point of a show is to be entertaining, so I have to let myself go and in a way become a different person.”

That defense mechanism, created in his earliest days as a solo public performer, is getting a good test these days for San Diego resident Fountenberry. The music on his recent debut album, “Electric Pocket Radio,” is scoring strong reviews and in-crowd acclaim for its charming yet subversive mix of classic-pop melodies, modern studio magic, offbeat imagery and introspective emotions, drawing frequent references to Beck and Brian Wilson.

“You can’t tell the studio genius from the kid fooling around in his bedroom,” rock critic Greil Marcus wrote on Salon.com. “Leroy’s cutting and pasting, as unpretentious as a strip mall, results in songs that throw you off: sunny, disconcerting, glowing with the smiles of benign phantoms.”

An even bigger test of his defense mechanism is about to take place. He’s set to be showcased as a fashion icon--thick-rimmed glasses, broom-like Afro and all--in a big print and billboard campaign by the Gap clothing stores.

“We’re launching a major ad campaign for the fall, and Moses is among the interesting personalities featured,” says Rebecca Weill, Gap director of public relations. “We chose a variety of people we think express their personal style in unique ways. Both his music and look are so original--mellow and a bit quirky.”

Says Fountenberry of the Gap experience: “They didn’t make me wear anything I didn’t want to. They just told me to be myself. They liked my striped socks--Halloween socks.”

It’s pretty heady stuff considering that Fountenberry didn’t play guitar until he was 20 and has been working only a year with a band of his own.

An only child raised in Oakland by his single mother, herself a musician and music teacher, Fountenberry grew up passionate about the music that surrounded him.

“I was listening to Hall & Oates and Duran Duran,” he says. “We didn’t have MTV, just AM radio. And my mom played a lot of Marvin Gaye, Nat “King” Cole, Johnny Mathis, people like that.”

But rather than play music himself, he focused largely on sports--he was on the junior national soccer team--and origami.

Once he started noodling on a friend’s guitar while he was a communications student at UC San Diego, though, Fountenberry was hooked on the idea of making music. But rather than start a band, he did it largely on his own, writing and recording songs by the dozens.

His first break came about two years ago when Mike Halloran, then between jobs as a San Diego radio program director, heard some of the songs and offered to help him shop his music around. That led him to Ultimatum Records, a Los Angeles independent (home to Keanu Reeves’ band, Dogstar), which offered him an environment in which he could grow and learn the business at a suitable pace.

The label hooked him up with such collaborators as Keith Cleversly (who’s worked with Flaming Lips) and Joey Waronker (drummer for Beck and R.E.M.) to produce what would become “Electric Pocket Radio.”

But just like having his picture up in public, having an album receive attention has created a bit of an image concern for him. This album’s sweet, whimsical tone is only one side of him, and he’s not sure his next album will be of the same nature.

“I have a lot of stuff--hundreds of songs,” he says. “My tastes have changed [since I wrote the songs on ‘Radio’]. To me, my music is serious, but a lot of people don’t hear it that way. On the next one, I want to reflect myself more.”

But is his “myself” Ron Fountenberry or the Incredible Moses Leroy? The singer says he doesn’t fear the real person getting lost in the fiction.

“The side of myself I put on stage is not destructive,” he says. “It’s just about being able to examine things in the moment and make light of them and make people laugh. When I get offstage, it’s not like I have to drink 50 beers to deal with the stage persona. I’m more in the mood to go watch cartoons.”